Shattered Wig Press, publisher of The Shattered Wig Review and many fine books of poetry and prose, has been going down the rabbit hole of culture since 1988. We are based in Baltimore, Maryland, home of Poe, Billie Holiday, John Waters, David Simon, murder, pavement surrealism and liberationist absurdity.
We are always looking to publish the gritty, mischievous, magically absurd, brutally poignant or simply put miraculous communication.

Shattered Wig #28

Coming In November!

Saturday, March 31, 2012

(Picture above taken with Smeary Blurry App on my six year old Kellogg's cellphone)

For three years I lived imprisoned in the basement of a Unitarian Church. I forget now the circumstances. My only contact with the outside world was that Chris Toll, Baltimore poet and friend, would once a week bring me Popeye's spicy chicken and news of the outside poetry world:

"You know that scene in Monty Python's 'The Meaning of Life' where that overworked working class British woman whose house is already filled with dozens of unwashed wild urchins is washing dishes and drops another newborn without pausing from her labor so to speak? Well, this new kid Michael Kimball is dropping out new novels like that. His agent keeps finding new ones lying in different corners of the house whenever he goes over there for a glass of fine Malbec and to discuss Kimball's latest surgery.

"That Milwaukee guy Adam who works the internet and the reading series like Xavier Hollander worked Johns, actually ascended to the Heavens like that blessed girl in Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. No one else was raptured, but Joe Young claimed he was there when it happened and that he saw the face of the Supreme Being who summoned Adam. Apparently He had a big wide goofy grin and yelled down to Adam 'Be sure to bring a mitt! And a sixpack!'

"Other than that, Barbara DeCesares is keeping Big Boyz Bail Bonds in business, enabling them to crank out those damn pens that you see everywhere - including in the hands of a Hopkins biologist on a segment of Eyewitness News - and Barbara and this Julie Fisher woman are holding all kinds of 'Sex' and 'Per Verse' and nude reading series. Julie even hired a lawyer for this one event on North Avenue in case things got really freaky.

"Of course, my pastor advises me against going to these things, but as an Elder Statesman of Baltimore poetry I feel obliged to keep up with things, even when they tip over into wild-eyed hedonism. Plus, someone has to hold Barbara's mink while she recites Plath while belly dancing."

What Chris told me on these visits kept my mind reeling while the Popeye's he brought me kept my stomach roiling. Who was this Julie Fisher and what drove her to air her goodies at such a feverish pace? Eventually I wrote "And the Horse You Rode In On, It Too Shall Be Ridden Naked By Julie Fisher". I was fairly happy with it, I got to parade Allen Ginsberg and Sammy Davis, Jr. around in it, but where to read it? I read it at Jamie Gaughan-Perez' apartment once and the reaction was horror.

Then Furniture Press decided to put out a new book by Julie, Skittering Thing and my wait was over. Of course I had to swallow my pride and shame as I heard fellow readers Femi the Drifish, David Native Son and Olu Butterfly read beautiful poems of love and social justice, but luckily Sir Alan Reese brought the tone back down with a piece about barbed wire underwear. Ah, the bar was back down into the nether regions so I could read my homage illness.

The show was well assembled by Julie herself. She booked Baltimore poets they she interacted with in the chronological order of when she met them, with the most recent going first. And as Femi pointed out, Julie truly does mix with the most circles of Baltimore poetry. Another thoughtful touch of the evening was the introductions that Julie wrote for each reader that Furniture Press honcho and host Christophe Casamassima read. At least a few performers, including myself, have said they want to use the intros for future biographies. And for the good of ailing wobbly ego, here is what kind Julie wrote for me:

Rupert Wondolowski-I love Rupert's paranoid bravado. He tells us all about scary things, and perverse things and even downright disturbing things but with a kind of sensual attention to detail delivered in a juxtaposing stream of consciousness that makes it all seem almost comforting. And just when we feel at ease he shows us another clown!

Of course, little did I know that Italian Futurist Barb DeCesares had a counterpunch awaiting me after the break where I was cast as myself in one of her little infernal plays voyaging to the afterlife with Julie cast as herself in her version of heaven with nude beaches, nude thrift stores and an orgy loving granny played masterfully (a show stealer, actually),, by none other than Commander Toll himself. Another fine performance was put in by Alan Reese as poet Barrett Warner.

Below is one of the lines I was forced to speak at gunpoint while Eugene O'Neill clawed at the dirt above his mealy corpse:

"But this is a nude beachand all I have to conceal my genitals with is a handful of marshmallows from Lucky Charms cereal".

Thanks Barbara. Yes, it has indeed been a long, slow painful descent since getting the "Best Actor" award for playing a character called "Life" in a High School one act play called "The Slave with Two Faces".

After Mrs. Fisher read from her fine new tome the icing was put on the cake with a closing performance by one man band Her Fantastic Cats. He even put his own signature on the classic old traditional "The Cuckoo".

Father Toll and I then happily but wearily stumbled through the darkened Goucher campus seeking my car and Adderol from passing frightened co-eds.

Thursday, March 29, 2012

Three words millions lazilydrawl in the courseof their otherwise-occupieddays. I watch them andcount how few actually picture that tender skinaged so briefly beforeit ripped itself openand invited them, a pack of unsympatheticstrangers, to enter paradiseby a short walkthrough all of its wounds.

No matter the masterof its mind, a bodyat thirty-three rejects for a bedmate death, and all its rottingcorpulent companions, hislungs and kidneys cry outto be taken to a manwho will think moregenerously on their behalf, give them their proper due, in hours spentaccruing the gloriousmold of old agelike fine clothes stored in a wetterrarium.

And what of Mary.Who must have rememberedas do the mothers of allerrant sons, the shapeof her infant in her arms,the milk that passed between them, not mademerely of lightbut of her own systemsand struggles. The newsof his fast bringing with itthe instinct, which neverleaves a woman, to feedthe one she boreout from the abyssby the sweat of her womb.

His hair, rakedwith thorns as alwaysit is in photographs,would have beenbetter suited by a chain ofdaisies, or the delicate goldgifted by a shy admirer, oras is often the casewith youth, unhindered in its beauty by decorationat all.

If the son needed to suffer, that we mightbe free, why mustit have been that momentwe chose to portray himas one of us? A prophetis one of us. A bard,a baptist, a whore with herhead perpetually bent to the feet of great men—washing, washing,and yet none of thesewould we dream of undoingbodily, or if so, no one would tell storiesabout it. It is onlyat the glance of a godthat we raise our weaponsand shoot him who dares to stir placidly like a buckin the woods, leave himbleeding out, leave the meatas an offering to our future

selves, for all the wrongswe still intend to commit.No one thinks of himwith goose bumps afterthe sun went down in Judea, or the pleasurethat must have imbededitself uprightlike a rod in his spinewhen he first learned his handsbrought happiness to those who had ailedfor so long. All formscelebrate their own triumphs.

Sharon Olds wrote about the Pope’spenis because she was too frightened to look Christin the eye. But there it is:understandableas a beast’s, and rightwhere it should be, usedas daily as anyone else’s,if one is to say, Godas man, one cannot averttheir gaze from the perfectionof men. Perfect

they are, we are to say,thanks to himand his yielding torso,giving itself over as onerelents to persistent love, concedes that allthey’ve ever had is not theirsuntil, blissfully, bloodily, it belongs to someone else, too.

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Lily Herman lives in Baltimore. A collection of her poems called Better than some, not as good as some others, was released by Furniture Press Books in 2011. She runs a reading series called “ILLITERATI” out of the Pent House Gallery in the Copy Cat building, and co-writes a blog of food stories called "What I Ate Where" with her cohort Adrian Shirk. She lives with seven dreamy humans and one cat, who, darling though he is, manages to stay almost entirely out of her poems.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

To quote from the oft quoted Beckett masterpiece, The Unnameable: "I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, wait, my name's on a tote bag, I'll go on."

I made it to the Publishing Genius book release party for Senor Powerhouse Justin Sirois' novel detailing the horrors of Fallujah, Falcons On The Ground and not only got to see some great friends and hotshot Baltimore writers and bon vivants, finally get to hear legendary anthropologist/philosopher/writer Alphonso Lingis read, soak in Adam Robinson's thoughtful interview of Justin on stage about the writing of the book and then get to hear Justin read from the book, but I also had the pleasant surprise of scanning the merch table - looking for some unguarded french fries or a just opened Coke - and seeing a fresh red and black Publishing Genius tote bag made for the recent AWP conference with my long-assed name among a bunch of other folks who I admire.

If only my momma were still alive to see the family name brandished on a thick durable tote that will one day carry Everly's Perrier (in about two hours later that night), Little Debbie Devil Squares and various tomes. Of course, mom would probably still have loaded the bag with oranges and beat me with them, taunting me with "Diane Rehm's got her own fucking radio show, tote bags are what they give the rubes who give money to her station."

And cheers to Justin for his fantastic new book, to Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy who helped him research it and to Adam Robinson for putting it out there in the literary wilds. The interview before Justin's reading touched on, among other things, the battle between making what you hope is a lasting work of art that will engage a reader versus partisan propaganda. Which reminded me of some old Revolutionary Communist pals who would only read novels that spoke explicitly of armed revolution.

Justin's apt illustration was the work of Sue Coe. Surely heart felt, but if you're walking through a gallery of it you know exactly what you're going to see. And most likely you're only seeing her work because you already are sympathetic to its message.

And here's to a wild-eyed dream that our country won't be sucked into another blood-soaked futile war! And by the by, Mr. Cheney, it should be pretty obvious that you and this heart thing just don't go together. Stick by your guns and try to live on pure bile.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Sometimes, unlike a recent ten minute trip to the CVS for some pricing stickers where I walked in on a botched robbery, witnessed some loud crazy-assed shouting match between someone in a big double-wide truck and a lady who got so pissed off she ran to get something (hopefully a crowbar and not a gun) out of the trunk of her car to attack the truck or the driver of the truck and then got a sales pitch from a glassy eyed panhandler who seemed to be filled with helium - it pays to go outside your home.

Such was the case a few weeks ago when I caught an Artichoke Haircut reading and heard some great new writers. One of them was Lily Herman and this poem by her makes me all riled up jealous. I love it and I hope you agree.

What we talked of firstwas a marriage. The same yearyour mattress disappearedeach time you couldn't sleep,and you romanced a bagof wet leaves in the nameof your many plays, we heardabout Isis

how she snuck to the woodsto be a bride, and your cousinsnuck to the woods to bea widow, and upstateyour niece was born beforeI even knew youhad a brother

In an oblong park circlingManhattan, we peered outthrough the baubled wallsand saw the armyof tunnels we'd been sent to checkfor bombs, or orphans, or moretunnels, I kissedyou like a monk who's forgottenhis prayers and goes on wordlesschanting in the dreary interimtill death, all the scarletflowers shut like windowsagainst pilgrims who lookfor a room to set downtheir sleeplessness

Before anyone could arguewe'd been on a date, we gotmarried to avoid their questionsOn our wedding day my brothertold you I walk like I keepall old countries lowin my hips, and not to expecta little aisle to change thatWhen you went away for a turquoiserope, we exchangedfeathers in the mail to remindeach other how few promiseswe'd actually made, that it mightstay possible to keep the one

I wore your father's suitthat I'd asked so many questions aboutand your niece was reborn to celebrateand one of my men had his granddaughterso that she could take our name, andyou wore me to the reception so you wouldn'tfeel overdressedaround usthe heat amassed into fat jewelswith teeth, or fragmentsof the skies we were born underthat only come back to hug or cutbut when you've been born as longas we have, inexhaustibly, you can'tinvite one and not another

Later we learned to take our Decemberswhen they came, and talked of nothingbut the blankness where our middle namesand the Soviet Union used to beOr sometimes we'd pause to drinka little, and wonder aloudwhy our parents had draggedus off the ancient star-beltfor this short hospital stay, sworewe'd never make more peopleif we didn't have a much better reason

And I looked at you and yousaw me for the secondwe eclipsed and it became Mayand we greeted our better reason

with no calendar counting downwith no little wives sweepingunder our feet we thought it ridiculoussaid Any room is a delivery roomif it's better than the roomyou were in last and in the lastnone of us had sons so I guesswe're making progress

Neither of us kissed anybodyfor years least of alleach other, and any timesomeone asked we saidThis is being redeemed, or saidwe were brother and sisteror cried in each other's armslike the time we were starving

And if your niece saw us thenshe instantly became my mother and growledat us for coming near each otherlike we might not feed each otherlike she didn't trust our intentionsand a hundred birds took offfor their chosen planets around us

Lily Herman lives in Baltimore. A collection of her poems called Better than some, not as good as some others, was released by Furniture Press Books in 2011. She runs a reading series called “ILLITERATI” out of the Pent House Gallery in the Copy Cat building, and co-writes a blog of food stories called "What I Ate Where" with her cohort Adrian Shirk. She lives with seven dreamy humans and one cat, who, darling though he is, manages to stay almost entirely out of her poems.

Monday, March 12, 2012

If You Meet a Man in the Street Who Claims to be Rupert Murdoch, Kill Him; the True Rupert Murdoch is within.

Fox News doesn’t love you, Delilah. Fox News doesn’t care about the time when you were twelve and your hamster ate its babies because you kept poking the cage and secretly taking them out to play with. Fox News doesn’t even know what motherhood is. Delilah, you’re so smart. Why do you listen to idiots? Listen, do you think Fox News will even bother to bury you when you become obsolete? Fox News doesn’t want you fixed: the squeaky wheel buys more grease. When you spend all your money on duct tape and amphetamines, Fox News isn’t going to be the one to hold your hair out of the toilet. Listen, I know they’ve said some things. That’s what mouthpieces do. Stop falling in love with lawyers. They are constructs. We are, all of us, constructs.

CL Bledsoe is the author of two novels, $7.50/hr + Curses and Sunlight, three poetry collections, _____(Want/Need), Anthem, and Leap Year, and a short story collection called Naming the Animals. A poetry chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available online at www.righthandpointing.com/bledsoe. Another, The Man Who Killed Himself in My Bathroom, is available at http://tenpagespress.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/the-man-who-killed-himself-in-my-bathroom-by-cl-bledsoe/. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. He’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize 5 times. He blogs at Murder Your Darlings, http://clbledsoe.blogspot.com Bledsoe has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, Prick of the Spindle, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere. Bledsoe lives with his wife and daughter in Maryland.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

It sure is nice when the pieces of a sweet night fall in place. I'd been feeling way out of touch lately. Doing the work worry home worry work routine gnarling the belly from the inside out, but as I set out for my first Artichoke Haircut night at The Dionysus Lounge the air was alive with that freshness and promise of jumpstart spring before the dead trouts of summer slide all through it leaving static cling to the neurons. Can's "Landing" was in the player - "I like your hairdo" - what a refreshing delivery of silliness above beats that are still new after decades of beatmeisters, beat diggers and beat to deathers.

Climbing the stairs to the upper den where the Artichoke readings are held I was whisked back to my youth of climbing darkened stairs for a Casual Carriers gig at Oddfellows Hall. What will the night bring? Will I black out and leave pieces of my stomach on my Charlie Brown jersey? Most likely.

From the get go, the atmosphere was bubbly. Ebullient. And I usually reserve that word to describe the blood gushers caused by sticking a pen in the folds of Rush Limbaugh's neck.

Mike Young the famous young lean poet who is a former Thai monastery Zen instructor told me tales of AWP in Chicago. The bartender cracked open a new gallon of Coke for me, saying "Cheers Popeye. And I'm not calling you that because your arms are big."

Bruce Jacobs, poet and musician, chanter, sat with his saxophone looking even more taut and sculptural since I last saw him. His head could now be severed by Brancusi and placed on a pedestal and win many art awards.

I was immediately placed at ease by Herr Shutz and by the amount of love I was getting from the new generation of Baltimore weirdos for Normal's Books, Records and Pocket Time Scramblers.

I got the lead off call and the crowd was gentle. A few even put leggings over the bats they beat me with. I was extremely happy that my newest babies - "On the Matter of the Pinched Baby" and "Snow, Tree Forts and Alcohol" - went over really well. I feel confident enough with them now to move them into the regular lineup.

Then Father Young took the stage among confetti poppers and promises of cake at the break in honor of this night being the first anniversary of the Artichoke Haircut launching.

With Joe's readings I always feel like I'm wandering through a warm fairly dark cave with someone who occasionally throws a strong light on carvings along the walls as we pass, images and feelings slowly adding up to dream enlightenment.

After Joe, after the cake, after a nice talk with Baroness Megan McShea about how she was frazzled dealing with her stable of pure bred daschunds all coming down with gout from her feeding them on rich lump crabcake, the open mic session began.

Now as most people who have attended a poetry reading where the gates of the public ear are swung wide open in a world of tortured souls, sometimes these things can have you reaching for Pernod that is no longer there or the cyanide capsule hidden in the false bottom of your cane - anything but hearing another Tori Amos lyric dipped in carnival floss and urped on by Rod McKuen - but honestly every reader here was sharp. Of course it was led off by time proven vet Bruce Jacobs, but all the other folks I hadn't heard before, possibly since I haven't left my house much in the last year, and they brought it like maid Elsa once brought incredible salami sandwiches in Kaiserslautern 1962.

Two of particular interest, I thought, were Lily Herman (who has her own reading series called, I believe, "Illiteratis") and C.L. Bledsoe. Lily has an interesting presence. She announced at the beginning that she felt like Bilbo Baggins, but she read with a quiet fierceness and there was a great sense of you never know what's coming next. Of course, she also stripped off her sweater and stood in black bra for her poem called "Fucking", but I am a happily married man, that is not what drew my honed artistic interest!

The other reader who reached my slightly tainted senses most was a gent named C.L. Bledsoe. Slightly on the larger side physically, he has a high, almost ethereal reading voice. He read a hilarious piece about ladybugs destroying the world and in the spirit of whoever it is inserting zombies into classic literature, he inserted the protagonist of "Diehard" into Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard To Find and Crime and Punishment.

Many thanks to the Artichoke crew for making me part of their anniversary and to homies of Sea Couch and The Baltimore String Felons for coming out.

Raymond Cummings is a freelancer writer whose work has appeared in The Baltimore Paper, The Village Voice, and on splicetoday.com. The author of two books of poetry - Crucial Sprawl and Assembling The Lord - Cummings lives in Round Rock, Texas with his family.

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Raymond Chandler As Martian

The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit Going Into Third Printing

My mutant baby walks again! 52 pages. "I have read The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit by Rupert Wondolowski. It is as good as the title would mandate being to warrant having such a bad ass title on the cover. The poems here are amazing and weird and funny, and for $9 you can’t really ask for much more. Get this quick.." - Blake Butler, HTML Giant

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Reviews

The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit - by Rupert Wondolowski
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My sparkling new baby has its first review, before the publication party even. My noose lays damp on my book covered bed and for that I hail Adam Robinson and Publishing Genius Press.
New from PGP: The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit
Posted by Blake Butler @ 2:28 am on December 16th, 2008 (Permalink)
I have read The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit by Rupert Wondolowski. It is as good as the title would mandate being to warrant having such a bad ass title on the cover. The poems here are amazing and weird and funny, and for $9 you can't really ask for much more. Get this quick." - Blake Butler/HTML Giant

Normal's Gold Plated Night At The Golden West

Nathan Bell, Michael Lambright & Justin Being Suave

Chris Toll Resonating At Wig 28 Party

Shattered Wig Review #28 Is Out!

After a two year love hiatus, Shattered Wig is back with an effulgent 66 page issue bursting with brilliant writing by folks like Stephanie Barber, Chris Toll, Amelia Gray, Michael Kimball, Adam Robinson, Blaster Al Ackerman and John Colburn and edgy "Slancys" by Professor Derrick Buisch. The full color cover by Rocco Randy George McWilliams Superfly III is worth the $6 price alone. Contact us here for a copy or buy one in person at Normal's Books & Records, Atomic Books or Minas. $12 will get you a two issue subscription shipped to your door.

"Don’t let the DIY look of the publication mislead you. Here, you’ll find sophisticated literature, with allusions to the visual poets, surrealist, automatic writing and stunning poetic lines like Stephanie Barber’s “one conducts electricity or symphonies, big bands or / trains or themselves with restraint.” There is plenty of worthwhile reading material in here all for only six dollars." - What Weekly

Shattered Wig Review #28 - $8 ppd

Shattered Wig Night Tinklers Publication Party

Chris Mason of the Tinklers

The Elements by The Tinklers

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Corn & Smoke by Blaster Al Ackerman

Corn and Smoke: Stories, Performances, Things by Blaster Al Ackerman 88 Pages, perfect bound, $12 postage paid from: Shattered Wig Press 425 E. 31st St. Baltimore, Md. 21218 Al Ackerman is the Mark Twain of the 21st Century, with a strong dose of Phil Dickian time warp and a heavy reading of every sci-fi pulp of the 40s and 50s ever printed. Not to mention the wry wit of a Perelman. Ackerman is serious about language and presenting the myriad onion layers of the universe, but he chooses for his subject the margin dwellers, the avatars, all the while with great empathy for the lost souls of The New Age. This collection brings together some of his out of print classic stories like "What My Bible Did For Me" and "The Crab" with new brain teasers like "The John Eaton Recommendations" ("little gauzy winged things fascinated him") and "Ten Finger Earl".

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Baltimore Magazine Award

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Shattered Wig Review #27

This issue boasts front and back covers by Baltimore's recent MICA graduate who has gone super nova in the last year or so - Erin Womack. Seemingly possessed by Star Wars, Weird Old Ladies With Mysterious Crystals and Persian Folktales that don't exist, Erin's art has been popping up everywhere in multiple mediums - children's books, cassettes, DVDs, storefront windows, shirts, hand printed posters, paintings, drawings. Other young Baltimore upstarts included are the poets Lauren Bender, Justin "Wifehair" Sirois, Jamie Gaughan-Perez, M. Magnus (from Alexandria, VA, actually, but he sure spends a lot of time in Baltimore), Stephanie Barber and Adam Robinson. For us they write in the sweet stew of language that blends post-surrealism, eternal absurdity, pathos despite itself and echoes of the ever looming LANGUAGE. 27 is also chock full of most of the damaged geniuses you've grown to love or despise: Mok Hossfeld, Blaster Al Ackerman, John M. Bennett, Eerie Billy Haddock and Andrew Goldfarb. And I defy anyone to not love the poems of John Colburn. His "Human Being In Celestial Mode" is the one thing that gave me hope in the new year. All that plus feverish cartoons, collages and drawings.

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The Whispering of Ice Cubes by Rupert Wondolowski

52 pages perfect bound. Prose and poetry by the editor of The Shattered Wig Review. $8 postage paid. "Rupert Wondolowski's gritty work is macabre, mischievous, playful, and irreverent, approximating a fusion of William Kotzwinkle, Ron Padgett (circa Great Balls of Fire), Richard Brautigan, and Charles Bukowski. These 39 pieces are delivered with the power and polish of French surrealism, and yet they are particularly American in nature, informed by a sort of seamy-underside-of-society perspective, presumably influenced by Wondolowski's residence in Baltimore, Maryland, stomping ground of two other great American surrealists, John Waters and Edgar Allan Poe. This is not some dour, pretentious art-for-art's-sake surrealism, nor is it some tepid experimental workshop riffing, but rather the work of a highly accomplished and unique writer with a twisted sense of humor." - Mark Terrill in Rain Taxi

About Me

Author of The Origin of Paranoia As a Heated Mole Suit, The Whispering of Ice Cubes, Humans Go Outside to Hurt You, Shiny Pencils, The Incredible Sleeping Man and Nightmare Rubber. Editor of The Shattered Wig Review and Press.